5 considerations when doing transformation projects

It’s important to break the transformation into manageable phases

Over the past year, we’ve been working with Wellcome to provide user centred design and agile capabilities for 3 projects to transform how they manage different areas of the organisation.  

From this work we’ve reflected on 5 considerations for anyone taking on transformation. Here they are: 

1. Start by understanding what problems you’re trying to solve

It sounds obvious but whether you’re procuring off the shelf solutions, or developing new tools in-house, it’s important to understand what problems you’re trying to solve and for who. 

You might have an idea of what’s not working already, or what tools or touch points to replace. But it’s important to take the time to really understand who is using or delivering your services and what they need. As my colleague Marianne recently wrote, this might uncover the need for solutions you didn’t expect or identify additional challenges to solve.

Over the last year we ran 3 discoveries with Wellcome to help them explore different ways to improve outcomes for users in finance, collection management and library experience. By conducting research with staff and members of the public, we were able to identify user needs, prioritise problems to solve and give recommendations for how to solve whole problems for users (beyond replacing systems).  

2. Know where you’re going

Once you’ve got an idea of the priority problem areas to solve, you can explore what the future might look like. Before making too many technical decisions, you need to agree where you’re trying to get to. Is the goal to replace old systems with new ones, or is there also an appetite to change how people work and what tools and touch points they use to improve outcomes? 

As well as solving current problem areas, you need to think ahead and reduce the risk of procuring or developing solutions that won’t meet your future needs. This might mean doing research into future technology trends, how your industry or standards might change, or how users’ expectations might evolve.

We ran future state workshops with Wellcome to help them think about what the future of finance or collection management might look like. We then reviewed different possible futures to get a shared understanding of what the scope of the transformations looked like. Reviewing these future state scenarios and building this into the transformation vision helped Wellcome to future proof procurement decisions and technology choices. 

3. Know how you’re going to get there

As well as knowing where you’re going, you also need to know how you’re going to get there. It’s important to break the transformation into manageable phases. Trying to replace and migrate lots of legacy systems in a complex eco-system all at once can have financial, technical and people-related risks. So it’s important to evaluate what would add the most value, test assumptions and identify organisational dependencies that might mean you deliver some stages earlier or later in the roadmap to reflect business constraints. 

We ran a co-creation workshop with Wellcome to create a phased approach roadmap for one of their transformations. The focus was on replacing systems that would add the most value first and de-risk delivery by driving change in more manageable chunks. Another outcome of the workshop was a recommendation to spend more time exploring areas of uncertainty and greater risk (such as systems integrated with lots of other systems and processes) before making certain technology decisions. 

4. Assess your transformation readiness

Taking on a transformation project is a big job. From procuring or developing new systems, to migrating from legacy systems, to training users in how to use new systems and changing processes or ways of working. All alongside maintaining your existing operations. 

It’s important to review the people you need to deliver the transformation (both from a capacity and a capability perspective). For example:

As part of our final discovery reports, as well as making recommendations for how finance, collection management or library experience could be improved, we also identified considerations for the different programmes to set up the right conditions for transformation to be successful. This helped Wellcome to adapt ways of working and identify roles needed to deliver the transformation.

5. Take a user centred approach 

While understanding business and organisational needs is critical to defining transformation scope, understanding user needs and bringing users along the journey is just as important. 

Whether it’s end users of your services or staff delivering the services – as my colleague Kath observed in a recent blog post about replacing legacy tech “You only really have one shot to build trust…”. Doing user research, sharing research findings and including users in the transformation journey, means you’re more likely to meet their needs and increase acceptance of changes in tools or processes. 

During discovery with Wellcome, we used participatory methods to encourage staff to feedback on and contribute to research analysis to ensure the findings accurately reflected their experiences. We also ran co-design workshops so teams had their say in what future solutions might look like to solve the problem areas identified. This helped validate what was already known to some teams, share this knowledge with stakeholders making decisions about the transformation and work through any gaps in understanding.   

Get in touch

We’d love to hear from you. What do you think are important considerations before starting a transformation project?

If you’re interested in learning more about how dxw can support you with research and design to inform your transformation strategy, please get in touch.